You are like a vampire or a ninja that can’t get out of the dark for more than 10 seconds.

You are diving and you have for 10 seconds of oxygen. You can maybe collect air from air bubbles.

You have a flash light with a 10 second battery life. Again, you might be able to collect more batteries.

You have to fight against or dodge holographic opponents that don’t exist for more than 10 seconds.

You can understand “seconds” as repeated portions of food. So the game would be about eating as much food as possible. I’m thinking about a game where you catch food, and have to catch the same food 10 (or 11) times in a lign.

I’ll be probably making a game for this next compo. I’ll be making it in javascript, probably using this cool library called Phaser.js!

Phaser is a full html5 canvas game library for both Typescript and Javascript that says to be heavily based on Flixel (flash). All I hope is that those great developers at Photonstorm release the 1.0 version before the competition. They were supposed to release soon, but they currently got a lot of issues because of the Typescript 0.9.1 update that seemed to make errors all around the place. (That’s what happens when you trust Microsoft. Ok, I’m sorry, Typescript actually does seem pretty cool. But whatever, to use typescript to your ease you have to have visual studio, and to have visual studio you have to have windows, and… naaah. I’ll just stick to plain Javascript. )

Good luck to all of you, and have a happy back-to-school time! Also, Mothman.

Unsquare is an puzzle game made with html5 that should also work on mobile.

I almost finished it, and to be fair, I would like some feedback, positive or negative, on it. Whether it’s about the difficulty, appearance, usability on mobile, or anything else, your experienced advice would be hugely appreciated. I am now at a point where I consider the game to be good, but a question floats in my mind: how good is enough?

Also, what do you think is better? having all levels accessible (like in B &W), or having to unlock them one after the other (like in Tristate)? I’m going to remove the clear all levels button once I decide myself on this. I’m also not sure if I should keep the rainbow levels at the end of Tristate…

IF FOR ANY REASON YOU CAN’T PLAY, PLEASE TELL ME.

Edit: Just for LOLZ: I had a problem where adblock interfered with my game since it prevented the clay.io api from being downloaded.

I have been making this puzzle game and had some really good feedback on it! I see that it might actually go somewhere!

I’m starting to think, even if it’s far away, how would I monetize it? It’s an HTML5 game, a casual one I would say. I am considering selling it on mobile markets, but I have no mac, no android and no windows 8. Since it’s html5, I can of course test it on my little iPod touch. The question that I am asking myself is if I should release a free online version AND THEN see what I could do. It seems that Flow Free did just that…

It’s HTML, and I tried doing stuff differently, and putting each part of the game in a separate html page, and have them appear onscreen through an iframe. It makes switching levels so much easier, since you don’t have to clean up, just reload the iframe. The problem is that the page reloads each time ;/

A few weeks ago, I officially published a game on Clay.io , a site specially for html5 games. Here: http://spinturret.clay.io/ .A nice thing about Clay.io, other than the useful api, is that they can host your game even before you publish it to their game collection, so you can check if everything is okay.

How I messed up, is that just before publishing, I mimimized the script, and changed the generic api script for one with only the features I used. And there is where I made a mistake.

Instead of doing clay.gamekey=”spinturret” , I kept the clay.gamekey=”YOURGAMEKEYHERE” .

Because of that, the api didn’t work, so I couldn’t keep track of how much people played, and they couldn’t submit their scores to the leaderboard .

The built-in leaderboard was I feature I really liked with clay.io, and it suited my simplistic game alot. It was supposed to be an important feature, so people would try to beat each other’s score.

Anyways, Clay.io does some promoting for the newest games, features them in their newsmail and stuff. If my game would have not been broken, I would have probably had some users interested for longer. Moral: always wait 24 hours after your last change (be it minimizing) before publishing your game. If you want absolutely someone to play it, you could go ask your Facebook friends, or maybe not.

Then, to my next point: my promotional image.

People judge by the cover, so yeah. What it looked like when I published it:

It seems pretty amateur, right? It’s just a screenshot.

But now:

But now I worked on it a bit and updated it, it looks like this:

Much better, right, much more professional. If I had this image when I had released the game, I would have probably gotten more players.This time, it’s not a screenshot, but an image entirely recreated in Gimp and Inkscape.

(Now that I compare both side to side, I think that I should at a speck of orange to the bottom one. I’ll maybe do that.)

Moral: screenshots and promotion art are really important, since it would influence how much people would get to your game in the first place. So you should have them nice and beautiful when you publish a game.

I didn’t do the latest Dare, I had exams. But still, I have a few things to say.

First of all, for y’all doing HTML5 games, Clay.io is awesome! Not only do they host your game, but also give you an API for adding Advertisements, Leaderboards, in-game purchase and whatnot!

Second of all, I reworked a bit SpinTurret, a game that I made for a Mini-Ludum dare, that weirdly resembles the current theme! It is a simple 2key game, the first of mine that I could call finished. I have also adjusted it to work on mobile. I didn’t finish polishing it yet, but here it is: spinturret.clay.io .

I have noticed this trend. When I spent alot of time programming things from scratch, I usually had much better academic performance in mathematics without studying too hard. Last year, after having a burn-out because of my 10 hours per week of swimming lessons and after quitting swimming altogether, I had lots of free time open. So I started learning javascript and making some really interesting stuff, learning tile-based game design and physics. And guess what? I got the best math grade in school at the end of that year!

On a seperate note, I had a busy week, giving in my IB personal project and going to the Montreal Science Fair. But now it’s over, and I will spend more time on my projects. For instance, I want to advance a web drawing program/game that I was making. I am also going to participate in the next Ludum Dare.

P.S. How do you change your profile picture? I want people to recognize me!

I have just realized that out of my 1 year and a few months of JavaScript, I never actually learned web design! I started to learn JavaScript practically at the same time I started to learn the <canvas> api. I know basic html, but I got in the game really late, and I started doing canvas before I could manipulate divs. I messed with node.js websockets, and I don’t even understand html forms yet. Shame on me.

Now, at the stage I am with my project, I’m doing the frontend UI, and html buttons, css, jquery and stuff would be really helpful, yet I am still noob at it. I’m going to concentrate on the parts that I know I’ll do well, and then, maybe I’ll collaborate with somebody.

<rant> On a side note, organising code in JavaScript is difficult! The way the inheritance works just isn’t natural, and there is no consistent way of managing packages. The browser way and the node.js way are incompatible! </rant>

So I started making an online multiplayer thingy. How hard can it be? I asked myself.

Well… PRETTY HARD! Making a game on a single computer has became pretty straightforward to me, but making a game on multiple computers is much more complicated, since I had to synchronize the characters, and make sure to remove and add characters when they connected or disconnected. I used js for both client and server (node.js) and used sockets.io to do the realtime communication. My code is certainly a huge mess! I had a chunk of code for the client, a chunk of code for the server, and a chunk of code that both had access to, not speaking about libraries.

Anyways, it’s a beginning, and I’d like to see some of you made try it, to make sure the port forwarding and everything is correct. The link will be valid until I will shutdown the computer or my IP adress changes.

When I was new to game making, I have been dreamed of making a massive multiplayer online role-playing game! And seriously, who didn’t at some point? So lets help to make that dream a reality!

We should have a mini ludum dare at some point called the Online Multiplayer Game Challenge, People would be able to make anything from a open world multiplayer game to some online app. anything that uses some server-side (or peer-to-peer) connection. The point of this jam would be to learn how to make something with computer networking — just that. To experience something new in a supportive community.

Since people would be learning something new, this jam should be longer than usual, 3 to 5 weeks with the last week for submitting the game, and 1 to 2 intense playing weekends afterwards.

This is just a proposition, and it would be good to know what you think about it. It would be also good to know what the Admins think about this.

Additionally, since probably people would host their game on their own computer, to prevent having their computer running all the time, we should plan when to play wich game. We could have some kind of up-to-the-hour calendar (Google calendar?) where people would mark their disponibility during the submission week. That way, they wouldn’t need to host their game for much more than 12 (?) hours (to pass through all the time belts). Even if the game would be hosted on a server, this would be a great thing, to have as much players as possible at a certain moment in time.